Posts from April 18, 2005

: On MSNBC’s Connected last week, I quoted a blog about McDonald’s 50th and I struggled over how to pronounce the name: EEE-ah-triss-dot-com, is what I settled on. And then I got email from the very nice blogger behind that blog. ieatrice is actually I… eat… rice. It’s even next to a rice bowl. I’m such an idiot.

But this does remind me, bloggers: When I want to link to a blog (or plug it on TV), I’d love to say the name of the blogger. But it’s amazing how many blogs don’t bother to put their names on their home pages and not because they’re trying to remain anonymous but just because they apparently assume that anyone reading already knows who they are.

As they say on NPR in letters time: Make sure to include your name and how to pronounce it…..

: Over at Michael Totten’s site, Mary Madigan rounds up the bugs buzzing around Prof. Eeyore, Juan Cole, starting with this from The New Republic (free but irritating registration required):

Having done hardly any independent research on the twentieth-century Middle East, Cole’s analysis of this era is essentially derivative, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists and Orientalists regarding Islamic and Arab history, the creation of the modern Middle East in the wake of World War I, and its relations with the outside world. Worse, Cole’s discussion of U.S. foreign policy frequently veers toward conspiratorial anti-Semitism. This is hardly the “informed” commentary Cole claims it to be.

Among the Arabist orthodoxies to which Cole subscribes is the view that external powers are responsible for the Middle East’s endemic malaise.

: I keep looking for signs that it is a parody but I can’t find them. There is actually a site called Friends of Al Jazeera. Why? “Journalism is in tatters and AlJazeera is trying to bring back some dignity to the profession.”